Website maintenance services, run on the same system that built your site

Who needs website maintenance services?

Any business whose website brings in work. A site that goes down, shows a security warning or still lists a service you stopped offering loses enquiries, and nobody tells you which ones. What the upkeep has to cover grows with the business:

• Established local businesses: the owner usually decides, and the site has to keep the phone number, hours, services and booking form right while the owner runs everything else.
• Multi-location and regional businesses: every location page has its own hours, services and people to keep current, managers each send their own changes, and a change to one page can’t be allowed to break another.
• National businesses: a larger site, with requests arriving every week from a marketing team or an outside agency. Upkeep has to keep pace with them and keep the site steady while it changes.

Some sites need very little of this. According to Wix’s help center, its sites run only on Wix’s own servers, and Wix performs software updates for you automatically. On a builder like that, the upkeep left to do is mostly words, photos and settings, changed in the builder’s own editor. If that’s your situation, we’ll tell you on the call.

What does website maintenance include?

Under that name, agencies sell five kinds of work: keeping the software current, keeping copies of the site, watching it, fixing what breaks and making small changes. The plans differ mostly in how often each one happens. Websults’ WordPress maintenance price page shows the steps in three plans:

WebFX’s maintenance pricing page counts the domain name, the SSL certificate, hosting, the content management system, plugins, general upkeep and technical support among the standing costs of a live site. Newmedia’s guide to web design cost says a monthly maintenance retainer pays for routine software updates, automated daily backups and continuous security monitoring. Its advice when comparing quotes for a new site: be wary of any that leave ongoing maintenance out.

The scope of our own monthly plan is written into your proposal, so you see what it covers for your site before anything starts.

Why is website maintenance important?

Because the software under a site keeps changing, and so do the ways it can be attacked. Four things go wrong on a site nobody looks after:

• Out-of-date software: WordPress’s own documentation says you should always update to the latest version. Since version 3.7, minor and security releases install themselves on most sites, and the rest still waits for someone to act.
• No copy to go back to: WordPress’s backup guide says to back up the database regularly, and always before an upgrade or a move. It adds that a host’s own server backups take time to request when you need one back.
• An expired certificate: the certificate behind a site’s https address runs out. Let’s Encrypt, a free, automated certificate authority run by the nonprofit ISRG, issues certificates valid for 90 days by default and recommends renewing them every 60.
• A warning in search results: when Google finds a site hacked or harmful, its Security issues report says the site can carry a warning label in search results, or show a warning page in the browser. Cleanup can start from the last good backup.

WebFX sets the floor: a site needs attention at least once a year, for the domain, certificate and hosting renewals. For updates, security patches, bug fixes and accurate content, it recommends a monthly plan.

What is a website maintenance plan?

A website maintenance plan is a standing agreement, usually billed monthly, that fixes the upkeep a site gets: the update and backup schedule, the checks that run, a number of hours for changes and a response time when something breaks. Agencies sell the same thing as a care plan or a support plan.

Before you compare two plans, line up the same points on each. Ask what the hours of changes can be spent on, whether hosting and the domain are part of the price, how fast a fix comes, and what the monthly report shows. Two plans at the same price can cover very different amounts of work.

What care plans cost, and what moves the price, is set out in the care section of our website design cost guide, drawn from the same price pages as the ranges on this page.

Does website maintenance include web design and hosting?

Sometimes hosting, rarely design. WebFX lists hosting among the costs of keeping a site live, while Websults sells web design, hosting and maintenance as separate services. WebFX also draws the usual line on design: a small update, such as new prices for a seasonal sale, falls inside most maintenance plans, and redesigning your product or service pages comes with a separate fee.

We design, build and run sites in our own system, so the same team that made your site looks after it. We don’t put sites on a server you run yourself, and your proposal says how your site is hosted and what our monthly plan covers. A new design is its own piece of work: our page on website redesign services covers it.

Is website management the same as website maintenance?

The terms overlap, and agencies use them loosely. Website management services usually mean maintenance plus more of the running of the site: new content, new pages, reporting and sometimes search work. WebFX’s maintenance page talks about website management costs in the same breath as maintenance. Websults sells blocks of 10, 20 or 40 support hours a month on top of a maintenance plan, for new pages, landing pages, and SEO and analytics work. Newmedia says retainers often bundle SEO and continuous content updates into one invoice.

With us, search work is a service of its own. Our SEO services cover it, reported against targets and never promised. The search setup that comes with the site itself, the structured data, sitemap and crawler rules, lives in the templates from launch.

What changes when a site is built in our own system?

The upkeep follows from how the site is made. Sites we build run on Astro or Next.js. Astro’s docs say its pages are pre-rendered at build time as static pages by default, so a page made that way reaches a visitor as a finished file, with no plugin or theme on a server waiting for its next update.

Changes go through the same build the launch did. The checks that hold back a draft page are part of that build, so they run again on every change, and the measurement switched on at launch stays connected. Content changes don’t touch DNS at all: the registrar, the nameservers and the mail records stay as they are.

Do you maintain websites you didn’t build?

Yes. When we take on a site built elsewhere, it moves into our system first: it is rebuilt there, with each old address that matters redirected to its new page. Our page on website migration services explains how that move works, with the ranges price pages and guides give for it.

If you’d rather keep your site on WordPress or another platform and only want it kept updated, a provider that maintains that platform is the better fit, and we’ll say so on the call.

What does website maintenance look like in practice?

The Alvy Logistics website shows what this looks like. We rebuilt it in our own system as a 70-page Astro site, and we look after it with Alvy. Alvy is owned by our co-founder Noah Alvarez, and DSI is an Alvy company.

Day to day, upkeep is mostly the business changing: a service to add, a location that opens or closes, new hours over a holiday, a photo of a finished job. Underneath that sits the quieter work, the updates, backups and checks that keep the site sound between those changes.

How do you know the site is still doing its job?

Upkeep keeps a site working, and measurement shows whether it still brings in work. From launch, a site we build reports to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, for the searches that find it, and to Google Analytics, for what visitors do once they arrive. Each step from a visit to a booked call is measured too, so a drop at any step, such as a form that stops sending, can be found and fixed.

Upkeep lowers the risks without removing them, and our care terms say so plainly. We do not guarantee search rankings, traffic, or uninterrupted uptime.

If your site needs looking after, or you’re not sure what it needs, book a 15-minute call. Bring its address and the name of the platform it runs on.